Insights To Live A Better Life
Michael Bloomberg is the billionaire founder of the financial services data and media company, Bloomberg. He was also the 108th Mayor of New York. He’s confident, outspoken and has strong views on how to start and run a business. I learnt about them in his autobiography. Here are the highlights:
Continue reading “What Michael Bloomberg Taught Me About Business”“As for preserving justice, this means keeping intact with humanity and justice, and searching out what lies within hearts, in order to mesh with them.
Searching hearts means finding out what rules them, by way of external you control the internal. If matters have complicated twists and turns, you go along with them accordingly. Continue reading “Secrets On the Exercise Of Power”
I’ve just finished a great run of binge-watching TV. Here are my favourites:
Money Heist (Netflix) – excellent Spanish thriller, which centres around a seemingly perfect robbery of a printing press. As the robbery proceeds we get flashbacks and glimpses of the lives of each the robbers. Gripping, I’m addicted. By the way watched it with subtitles not the dubbed English voices
The Boys (Amazon) – I couldn’t stop watching the 8-part season (surely season 2 will follow). This subverts the superhero genre by showing them as sleazy, fragile and corrupt. The plot revolves a group of regular people trying to bring the superheroes down.
The Matrix. The Sixth Sense. Fight Club. The Insider. Magnolia. Need I say more. For various reasons, the last year of the millennium saw an outpouring of auteur-driven filmmaking. Movie genres were redefined: was The Sixth Sense a horror, thriller or ghost story? What was Fight Club or Being John Malkovich? And new genres were invented like the horror pseudo-documentary – The Blair Witch Project.
Continue reading “1999 – the Best Movie Year Ever”
Wabi-Sabi is NOT wasabi – the green splodge that you get with sushi and sends a shock wave up your sinuses. Instead, wabi-sabi is the Japanese concept of beauty in imperfection. Continue reading “Imperfecting Your Wabi-Sabi”
No matter what we believe, we are hardwired to be affected by emotions, even at work. I learnt this at a talk given by Joan Kingsley and Sue Paterson, authors of The Fear-free Organization
We often look to others to compare, contrast, and evaluate success or failure in our own lives, and this mindset can be an incredibly powerful creative and motivational force. It’s entrenched in our biology, that desire to strive higher than those who surround us, and facilitated readily in our social media culture – even celebrated. Yet the value of the comparison mindset can easily be outweighed by envy, jealousy, and a loss of self-worth, feelings which tear down others and eventually ourselves. But there are ways to guard against this – here are four:
Continue reading “Four Ways To Overcome the Comparison Mindset”We take ourselves far too seriously. We obsess about appearing faultless to others or we become wedded to our opinions (or both). Someone who never took himself seriously was the American physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988). Continue reading “Think Different: What is Fire? Stored Sun!”
Doomer, prepper, primitivist, romantic, survivalist, millennialist, catastrophist* : these are all types of people that believe one way or another that civilisation as we know it is coming to an end. Many take the next step and join or set up communities that would survive such an outcome. Dylan Evans was one such person. In 2006, he quit his job as an academic and sold his house to fund the “Utopia Experiment” – a post-apocalyptic styled community in the Highlands of Scotland. Continue reading “No Place Like Utopia”
I don’t naturally lean towards poetry, I prefer the straightforwardness of prose. At the same time, I know that poetry, like music, can affect me in ways a novel or film never could. So, I’m always on the look-out for entry points to poetry, and I recently found one in the works of Pablo Neruda.
Continue reading “Love Life, Love Poetry”